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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24441049">Erotema</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/syailendra/pseuds/isaksara'>isaksara (syailendra)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Haikyuu!!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Getting Together, Just Some Good Ol' Fashioned Yearning, M/M, Pining</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 09:20:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,149</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24441049</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/syailendra/pseuds/isaksara</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years. Three conversations with the ace of Itachiyama.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sakusa Kiyoomi/Iizuna Tsukasa</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>126</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Erotema</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/painpackerrisingsun/gifts">painpackerrisingsun</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this is for Ginny because she planted the worms in my head and they literally would <em>not</em> let me rest until I word vomited in a doc. sigh. 394, what have you done to me</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Itachiyama boys’ volleyball team takes a nice bus to the venue of the Spring Inter-Highs—it’s air-conditioned, with plush seats you can sink into and seatbelts that don’t cut into your chest. The kind of bus you give to the team that represents Tokyo at almost every national-scale competition. </p><p>Tsukasa had once spent some time thinking about the bus the basketball team has to use sometimes, which is not as nice, with lumpy, hard seats covered in fake leather. There’s some kind of injustice in that. It had bothered Tsukasa for a while, but today on their way to the Spring Inter-Highs his thoughts are far away from justice. There’s something more interesting.</p><p>He’s been floating in and out of sleep for the last hour, cautiously reminding himself that the dragon made of river water taking off next to the bus window had only been part of a dream, and so had the mountain that had opened its mouth to roar, and so had the lady who’d appeared at the front of a bus before swallowing a yellow-and-blue volleyball whole. The skin of her throat had stretched around the spherical shape of the ball. </p><p>It had seemed like her neck would expand, expand, expand and drown the entire bus—Tsukasa’s lungs had seized up, rejecting air—but then Sakusa Kiyoomi had apparently fallen asleep and chosen to lean on the wrong side of his seat, because his angry spluttering as Komori catches him takes Tsukasa straight out of the dream and into the harshly-lit part of the bus, back on the plane of real things. The first thing he sees, in fact, is black hair being flung around as Komori pulls Sakusa back into a sitting position.</p><p>Afterwards Tsukasa can hardly keep his eyes off Sakusa—off the back of his head peeking up above his seat on the bus, he means—but that’s nothing new. Tsukasa has been finding it difficult to keep his eyes off Sakusa ever since he had shown up at the volleyball team tryouts, an only partly unknown variable, and played his first three-on-three right in front of Tsukasa.</p><p>Itachiyama always gets the crème de la crème when it comes to volleyball players because the school makes an effort to look; Tsukasa’s been aware of Sakusa Kiyoomi’s existence since his second year, when Coach had said, <em> start putting your feelers out for the best kids out there. I might miss some candidates</em>. Tsukasa and the other Itachiyama kids had gone to the middle school camps to watch boys on the verge of adolescence set and spike and receive, and they had taken notes. Sakusa Kiyoomi’s name had always been in those notes.</p><p>It could only have been a summer, then, between the last time Tsukasa had seen him play in a middle school camp and the time he showed up at Itachiyama’s tryouts, so Tsukasa had seen him, recalled his excellent form, and expected to see that.</p><p>Instead, Sakusa had sent a ball spinning wildly past the opposing team like a satellite hurtling through the atmosphere—a spike so lethally aimed and executed that Tsukasa’s first thought had been: <em> there’s no fucking way anyone could’ve received that. </em> (He’d been fifteen, okay, excuse the language, it’d been the thing to do.) His second thought, piercing and true like an ice pick through the throat, had echoed almost as loudly as the spike. <em> Let me toss to you. </em> Even his first words to Sakusa—though unspoken—had formed a plea.</p><p>The lint roller moment had just been the icing on the proverbial cake.</p><p>Now that Sakusa’s finally on the bus as a member of the starting line-up Tsukasa can barely contain himself. He suspects that the bizarre dreams have something to do with the boy sitting in front of him, about to play set after set of frankly unbelievable volleyball as a first year. <em> He gives me such incredible peace of mind, you know, </em> their former captain had said, <em> because I can leave you guys to prep for university and know the team is in good hands. </em> So here they are, on the bus, with Tsukasa as captain and Sakusa as a starting wing spiker. A first for both of them.</p><p>Tsukasa doesn’t know of this is something Sakusa counts as a joint thing—probably not, this is Komori’s first tournament as the starting libero too, and Sakusa is much more likely to think of himself and Komori as a unit rather than him and Tsukasa—but Tsukasa certainly does.</p><p>The bus comes to a halt.</p><p>Although the light from inside is reflected in the windows, making it hard to see the world outside, Tsukasa glimpses what seems like the parking lot of a rest stop. There’s a Lawson’s just a few (human) paces ahead and a gas station. Tsukasa doesn’t much like rest stops, but he ran out of hand sanitizer a few kilometers ago so he really has no choice but to get off the bus. He wishes the venue had been far enough to warrant a bullet train ride. Better luck next time.</p><p>“Are you going to the Lawson’s?” a voice cuts in when Tsukasa hauls himself off his seat. It’s Sakusa’s. Under the bluish glow of the bus lamps his eyes are even darker. The seat next to him is empty; Komori had been the first to rush off the bus after they’d parked.</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“Okay. I’m going too.”</p><p>Tsukasa had never been the kind of guy who got weak-kneed and thick-tongued around attractive people; he got over that awkwardness in fourth grade, when he’d fallen for Yamada Akane after she’d kicked him in the stomach in the school yard and realized that if he was too shy to talk to her she wouldn’t fight him anymore. </p><p>Sakusa isn’t like that. Even at the age of fifteen there seems to be some unbothered quality about him, an air that tells Tsukasa he wouldn’t be up for a fight anyway, even if Tsukasa knew how to form words around him. Which he doesn’t, not really.</p><p>“Why do you want to get off the bus?” Sakusa asks.</p><p>“My hand sanitizer ran out.”</p><p>“What’s your favorite kind?”</p><p>“The Tepika ones. They’re pretty easy to find too.”</p><p>It goes on in this vein between them. Sakusa asks, and Tsukasa answers awkwardly while hoping Sakusa will ask another question. He does—question after question after question, until they must be the source of eighty percent of the noise in the Lawson’s. They’re at the aisle with the bandages and the boxes of foot cream when Sakusa gets around to asking Tsukasa about the Spring Inter-Highs, about what the last one was like, does he have a favorite match, which opponent should they watch out for this year, does Tsukasa miss setting for their previous captain (he had been a spiker). </p><p>“I’m tossing to you now, so I’m happy about that,” Tsukasa says absentmindedly, wondering if he should get a pack of face masks, just in case. He takes one. Sakusa reaches out next to him and also takes a pack of face masks.</p><p>“You mean that? But you’ll tell me if you think my spikes need to improve?”</p><p>Tsukasa laughs. Sakusa gets like this. After practice he’d corner Tsukasa and ask how he could improve the way he hit the ball, and Tsukasa would always have to scrounge the corners of his memory for something to say. Before he met Sakusa he’d always thought he’d have an answer ready for this question. He’d thought that the Itachiyama’s new prodigy would require him to set in an entirely new way, to adjust his tosses to Sakusa’s jumps or run-ups, but Sakusa could work with any ball, hit any toss. Almost like while Tsukasa had been busy observing his habits on the court, Sakusa had been observing right back.</p><p>The truth is that setting had always felt like sending out a bolt of his energy to the world, watching it explode freely into the court, but Sakusa’s spikes make Tsukasa feel like his tosses land—not on the floor, but right on the palm of Sakusa’s hand, closing some kind of circuit. So that’s what it feels like, Tsukasa always finds himself thinking, without really knowing what <em> that </em> means. Electricity? Destiny? Maybe he’s being a little dramatic.</p><p>“Of course I’ll tell you. I’ll have plenty of time to tell you, you’ll see, because we’re going to win this.”</p><p>“Our chances are good,” Sakusa says.</p><p>On the way back to the bus they pass by Komori, who is tittering away with another first year. Both of them are scooping ice cream into their mouths. They’re sitting on the plastic barstool-like chairs by the counters, poorly hiding the fact that they’ve been staring at Tsukasa and Sakusa.</p><p>“Slow down on that ice cream or you’ll get sick,” Tsukasa says. Komori rolls his eyes. Tsukasa lets it go because yes, he’s exaggerating, but a little restraint never hurt anyone.</p><p>“Why’d you get out of the bus? I thought you weren’t going to get off the bus.” Komori is clearly addressing this to Sakusa, who shrugs.</p><p>“I changed my mind,” Sakusa says.</p><p>They get back on the bus. Sakusa falls asleep not long after, leaning towards Komori this time. Tsukasa hears the light tone of Komori’s voice when he speaks; it’s not possible to see his face. “He asked a bunch of things, huh?”</p><p>“Well, yeah.”</p><p>“That’s weird,” Komori chirps like he doesn’t believe it’s weird at all. “He usually doesn’t ask people things unless he thinks the answers will matter. And he doesn’t think the answers will matter unless he believes the person he’s asking is the type of person whose answers will matter, if you get my drift.”</p><p>It’s a good thing Komori can’t see him. Tsukasa blushes in an extremely uncool, un-<em>senpai</em>-like way. He wishes he could sit in Komori’s seat so Sakusa would lean on him, asleep, and dribble a little bit on the fabric over his shoulder. He probably wouldn’t dream of volleyball-swallowing women then.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Miya Atsumu of Inarizaki has his pick of good spikers—Tsukasa grins at Ojiro across the net—but Tsukasa has an incredible selection too: spikers with names that strike fear in the hearts of fellow players, waiting for the toss like lions falling into their crouches on a hunt. </p><p>Match point, chance ball, and Oomimi is marking Sakusa; the rest of Inarizaki’s defensive players follow suit and pick their own spikers to mark. A bold play. Certainly, if it’s Inarizaki that’s doing it, one blocker per hitter could be enough to prevent a point from being stolen, especially when the hitters have finished playing four sets and are at the difficult end of a fifth. It could be—if the hitters were the only ones who could score points.</p><p>The ball comes back to him from Kiyoomi’s receive. Tsukasa floats up to meet it, arms outstretched, a king on the top of his hill measuring the edges of his territory. The view of the valleys has never been clearer. He nudges the ball to the other side, watching the slow and graceful slope of his fingers block out bands of bright light overhead. Then he turns; sure enough, gravity has secured victory for them. An apple falls on Isaac Newton’s head. A ball hits linoleum.</p><p>He twists. The team is already rushing towards him in a yellow-green blur, but his eye catches one person in particular, staring wide-eyed at the spot in the air where Tsukasa’s hands had been. In another universe that last point must have been scored by Kiyoomi. It would’ve hit like an asteroid carving out a crater on the surface of the Earth. </p><p>For a moment the possibility of this strikes Tsukasa—would he have found more satisfaction then, having won by closing that circuit again, feeling that current that runs through the both of them? He imagines rushing forward. Putting his hands on Kiyoomi’s shoulders. Drawing him into an embrace.</p><p>Excuses, excuses.</p><p>The picture doesn’t last very long. His vision blurs. Motoya crashes into him first like a bolt of lightning, arms open, triumphant scream splitting the air. Tsukasa sees green, yellow, green, a goddamn tide of neon, and hears nothing but joy. They have a lot of supporters; that’s where most of the sound is coming from. </p><p>It feels like the entire world is cheering. It feels like you could drop a mic in Brazil and someone would be singing for them in Portuguese—<em> them, </em> Itachiyama Academy, the team of boys who adhere to volleyball like religion, with its rituals and philosophical tenets and sacred objects. All at once it hurts everywhere like it does after every single one of their practices. The pain is as good as anything can ever get.</p><p>“We did it.”</p><p>This is quiet. The team parts for Kiyoomi, Moses through the ocean, the entire universe suddenly silent but for the sounds of his movement. Just like every time they’d hung back at the gym long after everyone had gone home. Tsukasa tossing for Kiyoomi, Kiyoomi hitting for Tsukasa. </p><p>“Yeah,” Tsukasa says. “We did.”</p><p>The team breaks out into song—some bastardized rendition of He’s a Jolly Good Fellow Motoya is no doubt responsible for—and the moment breaks, Kiyoomi shuffles back to the edge of the crowd, still smiling. Just a little smug.</p><p>Before the awarding ceremony he reminds everyone to put on their jackets properly. He cannot believe they have to be told not to wear the jackets in the slung-across-the-shoulders way Motoya and Kiyoomi have been popularizing with reckless abandon. Tsukasa kind of thinks that Itachiyama uniform’s colors are ridiculous and the slightest bit undignified—someone had once described them as the fabric version of a lone trumpet that’s trying way too hard, which, you know what, is valid—but this time he’s proud of it. </p><p>Visually, their team is louder than a symphony of firing cannons. Here’s the skin of an animal with poison sweat that’s deadly to the touch—ignore at your own peril. It’s certainly not the first time Itachiyama’s won Nationals but it’s the first time <em> Captain Iizuna Tsukasa </em> has won Nationals; he’s going to come up to last year’s graduates and say look, you were right, we’re in good hands. I’ve got good hands.</p><p>“Maybe some astronaut out there can see us getting our medals,” Motoya whispers.</p><p>“Maybe,” Kiyoomi mumbles next to him like it’s not a bonkers thing to agree on.</p><p>Tsukasa looks at the other side of the court. Ojiro and Akagi, faces shining with wiped-away tears, are bracketed by Kita and Oomimi. The Miyas tremble with what must be fury.</p><p>“Hey, guys. I think Inarizaki maroon goes well with silver,” Tsukasa says, just to be a bit of a dick, because he’s just won everything.</p><p>Kiyoomi smirks, fully smug now. Ah, so there was still something else to win—<em> now </em> Tsukasa’s won everything. “Same. I think they should keep wearing it. Year after year.”</p><p>“Let’s make it happen.”</p><p>They’re the last to receive their medals. He’s going to go home, walk to the Itachiyama gym, and flaunt this in its face. Here’s for all the serve drills, the receive dives. Here’s for every bruise and every burning muscle and every drop of blood in the mouth. Fortune favors the prepared and Tsukasa had been so prepared fortune had had no choice but to favor him. He smiles to himself, thinking, no one’s worked harder. He dares anyone to prove him wrong. </p><p>“We’ve won Nationals,” Kiyoomi murmurs, again cutting through the din. “So are you going to stay on the team and play as captain again? Or are you going to pass down the title to one of us?”</p><p>“Hmm. The medal of the Spring Inter-Highs is prettier,” Tsukasa says. He’s thinking of the cherry blossoms carved around the edges like a wreath of laurels. Flowers gleaming gold on Kiyoomi’s chest. <em> Let me crown you again. </em>“It’ll look nicer on you too. I guess I’ll just have to be captain for a little longer so we can win it together.”</p><p>Years later Tsukasa will remember this moment and cringe. He has his excuses. He’s good-looking enough that nobody had ever told him how terrible his lines are, at least not up to this point. He’s tongue-tied because the light threads itself through Kiyoomi’s hair with all the cruel grace of a goddess’s hands. He focused too much, just seconds before saying the words, on the promise to lead the team again through the Spring Inter-Highs, and forgot to think about the rest. A mixture of all three.</p><p>In the moment it hardly matters. Kiyoomi looks down at the golden circle hanging from his neck and says, “Why do you care about how pretty it is? The medal isn't for decoration.”</p><p>Tsukasa knows. Just because something isn’t for decoration doesn’t mean it can’t be staggeringly beautiful. Could you ever call the number one high school ace in Japan a decorative ornament? Tsukasa doesn’t think so. And yet.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Tsukasa has an appointment. He says ‘appointment’ because ‘date’ feels too presumptuous, too baselessly hopeful. There has to be some word for it that has no romantic connotations but is less formal, less austere, than ‘appointment’.</p><p>He gets off at the nearest station and makes his way to the dorm entrance, where Kiyoomi is already waiting, his hands shoved into the pockets of his dark winter coat. His scarf covers the lower part of his face. He pulls down on it a little to reveal a face mask, then pulls down on that a little too to reveal his mouth.</p><p>“You’re late by two minutes,” he says, flat.</p><p>“Are you mad?”</p><p>Kiyoomi shrugs. “You got held up at a zebra cross, didn’t you.”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>Itachiyama has just lost the Nationals gold to Inarizaki, although they already have an unspoken agreement not to talk about this. They make their way to the gym where Kiyoomi sheds his coat, his tracksuit. The motions are familiar. He unzips his yellow-and-green bag. Tsukasa is hit by a wave of nostalgia for the sight of Kiyoomi and Motoya, walking across the gym, their jackets flaring out behind them like the wings of warblers.</p><p>Tsukasa asks about Motoya. Kiyoomi replies, clipped, that they’d already done receives yesterday, and today he just wants to hit. The energy in him is contained but bitter. Tsukasa guesses that before the week is out a few other players will find themselves getting dragged to the gym for extra practice.</p><p>It thrills him, though, that Kiyoomi had chosen him. It isn’t that they haven’t spoken since Tsukasa’s graduation, where Kiyoomi had said, simply, <em> congratulations and good luck. </em> (Tsukasa hadn’t taken this personally; Kiyoomi knows where he stands when it comes to casual social situations—people expect him to be reluctant, to be caustic, and he rises up to these expectations with a certain relish—but becomes awkward and wrongfooted on occasions that usually expect people to display exuberant emotions.) </p><p>They’ve talked, mostly by commenting on each other’s social media posts—which basically means Kiyoomi comments on Tsukasa’s posts because Kiyoomi almost never posts anything. Wishing each other happy birthday. Tsukasa had come to Nationals, seen Riseki drive the last point home. He’d cried with Itachiyama but praised them for their hard work and determination nonetheless. Kiyoomi hadn’t cried. He’d said: “There’s still the spring tournament, Iizuna-san.” Then he’d asked Tsukasa to come by the school the next time he had some free time. To toss for him.</p><p>“Call me Tsukasa,” he’d volunteered, without a tremble in his voice. “I don’t think we should be so formal with each other after all these years.”</p><p>“Tsukasa-san,” Kiyoomi exclaims now, sharp, and Tsukasa lets the ball fly.</p><p>Tsukasa likes playing with the Lions. They have spikers, good solid ones, reliable hitters who know how to score points. It is nothing like tossing for Kiyoomi. It is a feeling he’s mostly forgotten, but suddenly it’s here again, taking over him—the crackle over his fingertips, the sparks scorching the air where the ball had been. </p><p>The ball spins, a planet getting knocked out of orbit. Tsukasa feels like a god sending a great mass hurtling through frictionless space. That’s the thing about Kiyoomi’s spikes; they’re the things physics problems refer to when they say ‘assume no air resistance.’ What kind of resistance could anything put up, anyway, against something like that?</p><p>They go on like this for a while until Kiyoomi is huffing, doubled over his knees. Tsukasa says, “Let’s stop now.”</p><p>Kiyoomi looks at him mutinously.</p><p>“Wanna have dinner at mine?”</p><p>He seems placated by this. He straightens up and nods.</p><p>They take the train, which allows Tsukasa to observe the ingenious way Kiyoomi keeps his balance while refusing to hold on to anything inside the train. He stands with his feet apart, sways with the motion of the train every time it brakes or starts moving again. Tsukasa laughs and tells him that he can hold on to Tsukasa’s coat. It’s clean, after all. Kiyoomi does so. It is very warm in the train.</p><p>Kiyoomi has been to Tsukasa’s place before with a few of the other Itachiyama kids—there had been four of them, but that had been enough to make the space feel cramped and stifling. Despite his height and bulk Kiyoomi doesn’t actually seem to take up a lot of space. Once through the doorway, he takes off his coat and shrinks into himself.</p><p>He bought some mackerel this morning so he grills that on the pan and serves it with steaming rice and some boiled vegetables with soy sauce. There’s some tea from his visit to his grandmother last week, which he digs out and brews in a lovely ceramic teapot, a gift from Motoya. A spartan meal, for sure, because he hadn’t been planning anything, but Tsukasa knows Kiyoomi doesn’t care about that. He trusts that it’s clean. It’s nutritious enough.</p><p>The topic of Nationals is still taboo. Instead Tsukasa gets into the previous spring tournament, the one where he’d injured his ankle partway through their last game. He talks about his feelings, his realizations, so Kiyoomi doesn’t have to lay out his own. Some bruised part of him still thinks of tournament prep as an intricate house of cards.</p><p>“Kurosaki blames himself for the loss because he had set for the last few moments instead of you.”</p><p>“That’s not right. He can’t conclude that.”</p><p>“I told him that. But he said something about a chain being only as strong as its weakest link.”</p><p>“We never have a weakest link,” Tsukasa says. “Not even on the bench.”</p><p>Kiyoomi nods. “I told him that too.”</p><p>“Good. Hey, Kiyoomi-kun. Be honest. Do you miss my tosses?” He grins, meaning to sound flippant, but the words tumble out like he’s coughed up his own heart.</p><p>For a moment Kiyoomi is quiet and Tsukasa thinks that’s it, he has fucked it up, he gave away way too much and Kiyoomi will retreat away into the dorms of Itachiyama. But then: “I do miss playing with you and having you around. The team’s a little more chaotic these days; everyone borrows my lint roller. Kurosaki’s sets are just about as good as yours, though.”</p><p>Tsukasa can’t decide whether he feels stung or gratified. He goes to wash the dishes. Kiyoomi doesn’t offer to lend a hand.</p><p>“Tsukasa-san?”</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p>“What would you do, if you couldn’t play volleyball anymore? If suddenly you got injured and the effects were permanent.” It’s merely Kiyoomi’s habit to ask uncomfortable questions. If this were anybody else, Tsukasa would deflect. <em> I’m never going to stop playing volleyball </em>. An easily-accepted response, a cue for both parties to laugh. This is Kiyoomi, though, so he finishes wiping the dishes dry and comes back to him. “What’s your exit strategy?”</p><p>The thought suddenly occurs to Tsukasa that Kiyoomi might be asking for advice. Or that at the very least this is more than curiosity—Tsukasa knows he has Kiyoomi’s respect, at least, and that the opinion of a man who has earned his positive regard over years of playing together might matter to him. If not as something to follow then at least as some sort of benchmark.</p><p>It’s silly, but this fills him with pride. Occasionally he comes back to the idea that his feelings for Kiyoomi have caused him to overly romanticize the bond between <em> senpai </em> and <em> kouhai </em> even though they do not fit so neatly into those boxes. After all it is Tsukasa who looks at Kiyoomi with starry eyes, drinking in every word that spills out of his mouth. It is this hunger that should mark the role of the <em> kouhai, </em>and yet it belongs wholly to Tsukasa. </p><p>Here Kiyoomi is, asking, but when Tsukasa speaks to give him his answer it feels like he’s the one with the question.</p><p>“I’ll coach. Itachiyama, probably. One of the other Tokyo schools if they won’t take me.”</p><p>“Itachiyama will take you.”</p><p>“You think so?”</p><p>Kiyoomi looks at him like he’s just said something very strange. “Why wouldn’t they? You’d be a really good coach.”</p><p>As with everything else, he says this without inflection. There is nothing more reassuring than the fact that Kiyoomi never says such things to reassure. </p><p>“I couldn’t coach. There’s too much—too many people. I couldn’t get a handle on all that.” This, too, Kiyoomi says plainly. It becomes clear that he doesn’t consider it a personal failing, so Tsukasa decides to push the issue gently.</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>He knows it’s greedy of him, to want to bask in the sound of Kiyoomi thinking out loud, but sooner or later he will say his goodbyes and return to Itachiyama, leaving Tsukasa here with himself—so what’s the harm in a little indulgence? “It’s easier to get your teammates to understand you. It’s fine to expect <em> you </em> to not be offended by my words because you’re familiar with my personality. It wouldn’t be fair of me to expect that of children or teenagers when I’m much older. And if they can’t understand me, they won’t benefit from my coaching.”</p><p>“Logical,” Tsukasa says with a nod.</p><p>“So my exit strategy can’t be the same as yours.”</p><p>Kiyoomi talks about university options. Tsukasa listens patiently as Kiyoomi lays down the pros and cons, the details of each scholarship offer, the different majors he’s considering. When he asks about Motoya, Kiyoomi shrugs and says Motoya’s going to some try-outs, although he’s going to take an internship in their uncle’s company first. What kind of internship, Kiyoomi appears to have forgotten. But Motoya seems excited about it.</p><p>They move out to the balcony of Tsukasa’s place; really, calling it a balcony makes it seem like a more romantic location than it actually is—it’s just a piece of the building that sticks out, barely wide enough for two people, with plastic-coated railings someone’s snuffed a cigarette out on once upon a time. Tsukasa sweeps this part of the flat too although he knows the other tenants don’t do that and usually allow dust to collect on the floor. Dust will always collect on the floor; the city is always throwing new tiny pieces of itself into the air to be carried by the wind to all available surfaces. It’s an endless battle.</p><p>Kiyoomi makes his mind up to get into a university, continue to play volleyball competitively, then try to get into whatever team faces Ushijima Wakatoshi most often—to make up for being robbed of the opportunity to play against him at the Spring Inter-High that should’ve been Shiratorizawa’s last national tournament. He speaks again of the player who had collapsed from a fever with particular disdain. The Miyagi representative team. An outlier, to be removed from the table of results.</p><p>Then suddenly he is silent. His bare hands grip the railing.</p><p>“What if this was the last time we saw each other? Would you have any regrets?”</p><p>“What? Kiyoomi-kun, is something wrong? Are you sick?”</p><p>“No, it’s just a hypothetical.” Tsukasa sighs with relief. Kiyoomi is the kind of person who sometimes talks in riddles. They seem to make all the sense in the world to him when he says them, because he always speaks with such conviction. This looks like it’s shaping up to be one of those times. He continues: “I don’t want to have regrets. I’ve been thinking about endings—what I’d feel about things if they were suddenly over. Anything can end at any time.”</p><p>Tsukasa feels it. Skin on skin. The contact is sudden, like the first raindrop that hits your forehead before the sky whips up a storm. Kiyoomi’s fingers abruptly close over his hand on the railing; they’re warm, dry; pliant in the gentle way of skin. He looks up from the shocking sight of their hands over each other to Kiyoomi’s face, eyes dark and huge, like he, too, is astonished at the turn of events.</p><p>They had always had a volleyball between them—the wire in the circuit, so to speak—to mediate touch. Tsukasa’s hand on blue stripes, joined not a moment after by Kiyoomi’s on the same ball. For years, this had been enough for Tsukasa, who had always known the careful way Kiyoomi backed off from a gathering crowd. Besides, though he’d always made the effort to invite Kiyoomi out to team outings—karaoke, movies, hiking—and Kiyoomi had always accepted, Tsukasa had always thought that Kiyoomi’s regard for him started and ended with the rhythms of the sport.</p><p>He digs up the memories of wiping things down in the gym alone with Kiyoomi; of walking out from karaoke joints with him into the biting air—breathing out huge puffs of cotton in winter—to get to places where the noise was more muted; of the countless Lawson’s and Seven Elevens and Family Marts they’d crouched in together, filling their little baskets with soap, wipes, lint roller refills. In those moments Tsukasa had thought, <em> because of volleyball, we are here, doing this together </em> —at first with giddiness, and later on with a despairing sort of resignation. So it’s not true. They were always there, doing those things together. <em> Because of volleyball. </em>But not just that.</p><p>The surprise wears off. It is easy for Tsukasa to understand what Kiyoomi means. In some ways maybe this has always been true, and maybe that’s why they’re here now, on this balcony, with Tokyo’s undying light sinking its teeth into them. Comprehension. Connection. Two sides of the same coin, Tsukasa thinks, as he leans forward with necessary cautiousness. Kiyoomi mirrors the motion. <em> Let me touch you. </em></p><p>Start, end, and start again with a plea. <em> May I, </em>murmurs a certain kind of movement, curving gently like a punctuation mark. An incision around the ribs.</p>
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